The existence of the movie Tammy and the T-Rex, starring Denise Richards and Paul Walker, seems like one of those pieces of internet lore that everyone on the cool message boards already knew about (and didn’t tell me), but the YouTube video only has 11,000 views when it should have at least 11 million, so I’m considering it a Forgotten Classic for our purposes.

Directed by Mac & Me‘s Stewart Raffil, who should get some kind of bizarre-movie lifetime achievement award for these two titles alone, Tammy and the T-Rex stars a pre-breast implants Denise Richards and a be-bellyshirted Paul Walker in those heady days of 1994. It has a plot that I could try to explain, but I think I’d rather just copy the trailer narration word for word, because this is like dada-ist poetry:

Everything in Tammy’s life is just great. But when you’re young and in love, life can get VERY complicated.

(*cut to shot of Paul Walker eating a rose*) [Note: It is never explained why Paul Walker is eating a rose]

ESPECIALLY when it involves an INSANELY JEALOUS creep.

(*cut to a fight, including the line “DO it, Billy! Do it!”, which belongs in every film*)

Late night phone calls. Sneaking around in your own house. Your boyfriend getting dumped in a wild animal park. And a crazy doctor… who turns out to be a MAD SCIENTIST.

…with an insane invention, that only needs a brain.

But THIS Tyrannosaurus Rex just wants to be a PARTY ANIMAL.

This narration should be in a museum.

Even when you TELL THE TRUTH, nobody believes you anymore.

Mad Scientist screaming: I WILL GIVE YOU IMMORTALITY!

Not if TAMMY has anything to say about it!

So, from what I can piece together – and the plot requires a surprising amount of piecing together for a trailer that’s 90 percent didactic narration – Tammy is dating this handsome, free-spirited idiot played by Paul Walker, who’s so inept that when she gives him a rose he thinks it’s food. But he’s romantic and innocent and doomed, like some combination of Forrest Gump and the Noble Savage, and Tammy falls hard for him. Enter Tammy’s jealous ex, who kidnaps Paul Walker and literally throws him to the lions at a wild animal park, where he’s found barely clinging to life and taken to a mad scientist who has built a robotic T-Rex that just needs a human brain to make it a cyborg. The scientist puts Paul Walker’s brain inside a robotic T-Rex, setting up a climactic battle for control between Tammy, the girl who loves the boy that the T-Rex was, and the mad scientist who created the cyborg party animal that he has become.

I would give almost everything I own to have been in a room with the guy who explained that idea to another guy who then wrote the first guy a check.

Imperial Entertainment strikes again! They made one of my favorite Cyberpunk movies of all time, _Nemesis_ (Avoid the Nemesis sequels though) and they also made this? Now I want to track down a copy, looks like pure fun.

Also, I know the mad scientist is Bernie, but my shitty movie love as a child chooses to remember him as Uncle Max in “Side Out” and Creepy Hairy Mole-having Bad Guy in “Mannequin 2: On the Move” opposite Kristy Swanson and Herman’s Head

A friend and I rented this way back in 1994 when it came out and while it was only rated PG-13 on the box and tape I remember distinctly scenes of extreme, comically over-the-top gore on the tape we watched, such as a car full of teenagers getting squashed under the T-Rex stomping on it and a geyser of blood spraying out the broken windows. The video store had this movie in the Family section too.

Anyway, from what I can tell it’s only ever been released rated PG-13 on home video (I don’t think it ever played theatrically), and I found a copy for sale at a small town video store selling off their stock this past summer and re-watched it for the first time since that original viewing. But to my surprise all these really gory scenes were nowhere in the movie, but not such that I had imagined them, but that anytime there was supposed to be a scene I remembered it just cut from right before that action to the next shot or scene, as if sloppily censored. As if it was originally an R-rated movie but they cut it down to market it to “kids”, even though it’s still far from a kids movie.

And from my research online no one knows of an R-rated version ever being released or existing…But I’m sure I saw it and didn’t just imagine it all or fill in the blanks as a young kid… At least I didn’t imagine Denise Richards’ babeness in this movie.

Young Denise Richards, good lord. She was the pinnacle. Then she had to go and get mixed up with Charlie goddamn Sheen. Sad. This trailer, though, is magical. The very apotheosis of ’90s direct-to-video movie trailers.